This Week In Techdirt History: May 8th – 14th

from the so-that’s-what-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, Europe was putting free speech at risk as it struggled to figure out what to do with the GDPR, but stateside the big fight was over net neutrality. A John Oliver segment on the issue appeared to cripple the FCC website for a second time, but the agency claimed it was actually due to a DDoS attack — and then people noticed that a bot was flooding the website with anti-net neutrality comments. At the same time, the FCC was using garbage lobbyist data to defend its stance.

This was also the week that Donald Trump fired James Comey, and that we wrote about the first hearing and the ongoing filings in the lawsuit against us.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the jury in the Google-Oracle trial was very confused, Twitter was challenging a court ruling saying users have no standing to protect their own account info, Verizon was similarly fighting for consumer privacy but in this case against copyright shakedown attempts, and a key ruling about copyright termination rights suggested big trouble might be coming for record labels. The TPP was falling apart while the USTR was insulting the intelligence of its critics, MP3Tunes declared bankruptcy in the face of legal costs, and Perfect 10’s case against Google was dismissed (in the same week it filed a new one against Tumblr).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, NBC was still in a love-hate relationship with YouTube, Thailand was more firmly on the hate side and followed up its YouTube blocking order with plans for a lawsuit (and passing new regulations to allow even more site blocking), and Australia extradited the head of a software copying ring to the US. Uri Geller was abusing the DMCA and filing lawsuits to silence critics, while we noted how bogus DMCA complaints can be a way to generate publicity. And as bloggers were beginning to face more legal threats, we reminded them that they can benefit from anti-SLAPP laws.

Filed Under: history, look back